I was just playing around with Google Trends. A great tool to compare search popularity between search terms.

How much impact storage startups really have on the market is hard to pin down, but the search popularity of individual brand names does provide some perspective.

Below, I compared worldwide search popularity between Storage Startups over the last 6 years. I looked at three groups; Boxed Storage, Software-only Storage and Server-side Caching Solutions. Then to put the Startup scene in some perspective I compared the most popular of each group to storage giants EMC and Netapp.

I had a great chat today with Rado Danilak, the founder and CEO of Skyera. The company has been greatly introduced by Chris Mellor in August of last year. They certainly had my interest then with their very low $2 dollar per GB of Flash storage and 500 TB per 1 U unit / 21 PB per rack storage density.

These specs are so good, they could arouse suspicion. At least until you realize that Rado is not only the founder of Sandforce but also the engineer behind the best chipsets ever at NVIDIA.

I was given a few scoops today that reveal how well Skyera is doing. Today, Rado told me that in fiscal year 2012, before the 51.6 million in funding, Skyera turned a healthy revenue of $3,6 million.

The revenue numbers for 2013 he could not give yet, but will reflect strong growth.

The relevance of these numbers is that Skyera has been able to create much more revenue, much earlier, than competitors like Pure Storage and Violin Memory.

In addition to these impressive figures, Rado also announced that they will be shipping their product in volume within two weeks from now (May 2014).

Skyera seems to set itself apart both in engineering power and in healthy financials, I look forward to seeing what this company will do.

Later this week I will update a full article on the interview I did with Rado. So tune in later!